Firefox 7 Beta 5 Released

Mozilla recently released Firefox 7 Beta 5, the beta has been made available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. Mozilla is planning to release Firefox 7 final by the end of September 2011. Early adopters can install Firefox 7 beta 5 to test the new features. The boost of memory performance is the key aspect of Firefox 7. Mozilla's MemShrink project aims to reduce Firefox's memory consumption and avoid memory leaks in Firefox 7. Mozilla claims that Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6: often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less.

The latest version of Firefox beta has the following changes: drastically improved memory use; add a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems; bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync; added support for text-overflow: ellipsis and Web Timing specification; added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox. This can be enabled by installing an add-on Fixed several stability issues.

Firefox Beta is the build for those who like a little bit of jeopardy, but who don’t want to risk everything by trying out Firefox Aurora. It gives you a sneak peek at the next version of Firefox with a relatively stable build that’s not quite ready for primetime, but still pretty solid. Whereas Firefox Aurora installs as a completely separate application alongside your existing Firefox installation, Firebox Beta will replace the stable build. Should you subsequently wish to go back to the safer version, you’ll need to manually download the stable version and install it over the top of the beta build. Confirm which build you have by selecting About Firefox from the Firefox menu or button (it’s inside the Help menu if using the Firefox button).

Compared with the recent released Firefox 6, Firefox 7 is a bigger update, with much improved memory management and a host of similar features. There are all the usual improvements including enhancements to Firefox Sync, increased performance for HTML5 Canvas animation and better CSS3 support, but none of those really matter because there's one important improvement that isn't even visible to the user.

The latest Firefox 7 brings a number of fixes to the memory footprint, particularly for users who like to keep multiple tabs open and iconify rather than close their web browser. Other changes include dropping http:// from the awesome bar and painting the sub-domain element of a URL in lighter grey.

As we have seen on previous Firefox versions, there aren't important visible changes in this new release, but, nevertheless Firefox 7 is speedier and comes with bug fixes. Mozilla's next release of Firefox will be known for its significant reductions in memory utilisation, an issue that has dogged Firefox since its first release. Now Mozilla says it has implemented what it calls Memshrink in such a way that it expects somewhere on the order of a 20 to 30 per cent decrease in memory utilisation and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.

Firefox 7 features proper remedy to the age-old memory leak problem. Instead of relying on the user to manually free up memory using the "about:memory" dialog, version 7 takes control of the process itself through increased garbage collection frequency and defragmentation of memory chunks, which will reduce Firefox's memory consumption by tens or even hundreds of megabytes over a lengthy period. In the meantime, how you can stop Firefox's increasing memory demands from spiralling out of control? The answer lies with a tiny add-on appropriately titled Memory Restart.

Memory Restart does two things: first, it displays Firefox's current memory consumption in the Add-ons Bar. This immediately reveals how Firefox's memory demands increase over time, regardless of how it's being used. When Firefox's memory consumption hits 500MB, the text will change to red to warn you that it's in danger of overrunning the rest of your system, telling you it's time to shut down and restart Firefox to free up most of the memory it's snaffled. Memory Restart's other trick is that you can configure it from its Options dialog to automatically restart Firefox when the 500MB threshold is reached, preserving all your open tabs and allowing you to continue browsing without too much hassle. Better still, the arbitrary 500MB figure can be altered to any amount you like, allowing you to tweak Memory Restart according to the amount of installed RAM in your computer.

-http://news.brothersoft.com